Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [116]
Faris is reluctant to take the publisher’s responsibility for marketing and advertising problems. After all, he is working full-time for the president. So he wants me to find someone who can market. He’s already paying five men to do marketing, he says, but they have no impact. I have no idea where to start. I want to help him, because I want people to read the product I work so hard to edit. But I only stretch so thin. I cannot be both editor and marketer, even if that were ethical.
It’s clear that Faris’s loyalties are to the regime, not to reporting. And he mistakes public relations for journalism. In that case, why does he even have a paper? He has given me his reasons: to encourage tourism and development by writing about Yemen’s attractions. By writing about Yemen in English, he believes he can communicate Yemen’s charms to a broad international audience.
But this still fails to explain Faris’s lack of interest in quality. Even if he wants the Yemen Observer to be no more than a cheerleader for the country, I would expect him to care about how well it is written and reported. I would expect staff retention to matter.
Zuhra offers an explanation. “In Yemen there is no such thing as bad paper and good paper. The quality of journalism overall is bad.” Because all newspapers in Yemen—both Arabic and English—contain legions of mistakes, expectations are low. Quality doesn’t matter. Publishing a paper in English is prestigious enough, she says. Who’s going to complain about quality, other than me and a few ambassadors? And why should Faris invest in quality when he can expect such low returns for it?
Owning a paper also gives Faris power, she says. He can protect himself through media, using it to further his own goals. Publishing in English also allows him access to the international community. If the paper lands in trouble with the government, the case gets international attention.
Zuhra respects Faris, who has been generous and kind to her. But she thinks him too pragmatic to produce brilliant journalism. He cares more about selling ads than he does about printing stories that could change the country.
COME APRIL, Faris is chronically absent. Even if he does manage to slip upstairs to his desk while I am in the building, he avoids me. Never once does he poke his head in to see how things are going. Never once does he tell me I am doing a good job. Or a bad job, for that matter. Sometimes I wonder if he remembers I am here.
This is not the relationship I’ve dreamed of having with my employer. After his effusive warmth during my first trip, I had hoped to be invited to dinner at his home, introduced to important Yemenis, confided in about national affairs. I had imagined us meeting over coffee or lunch to brainstorm new ideas for the paper and to discuss our progress. I had thought he would be someone I could turn to for guidance, or at the very least information about Yemen’s inner workings. It would have made all the difference.
These dreams have vaporized. Not only is Faris physically not present most of the time I am in the office, but when we do meet, our conversations average forty-five seconds. I can always sense his impatience to finish with me and get back to his Really Serious Work for the President. Talking with him makes me so anxious that I nearly always decide that several of the urgent matters I needed to discuss with him are not so urgent after all. Maybe Hassan can wait another week to get paid. Maybe I don’t need that plane ticket back to New York. Maybe I can do without a copy editor. I